Cletis R. Ellinghouse

Wayne County's Lost River Settlements Cletis R. Ellinghouse

Wayne County's Lost River Settlements is a history of six hamlets in southeastern Missouri that were destroyed by the government to clear the landscape for development of Lake Wappapello on the St. Francis River in the late 1930s. Several of the profitable river bottom homesteads had been in the families for well over 100 years, but with nothing else to do the evicted farmers moved on reluctantly in what became the greatest upheaval in the history of the county. With so much of Wayne County's assessed valuation lost in the government buyout, it was feared remaining tax revenues would be inadequate to support essential services and that the county's various parts by necessity soon would be attached to adjoining counties. That didn't happen, but citizens at the doomed county seat, Greenville, struggled through an ordeal of pain and uncertainty that went on for several months before finally coming to an agreement to build a new town outside the flood plain. Greenville's turmoil and fight for survival is covered in the concluding segment of the book. It lives on as the county seat in its new location, but little is known today of the lost settlements-Chaonia, Taskee, Ojibway, Bethel, Center Ridge and Kime, each near the other and all at the time of their destruction closely aligned by blood and marriage-which gives added significance to the discovery of the papers of Henry Yeakley Mabrey (1836-1915), who spent his childhood at Kime and for the greater part of the rest of his life resided a few miles to the south at Center Ridge, which was just north of Chaonia, whose birth he witnessed in 1888. Chaonia, a railroad town, became the trading center for one of the richest farming areas in the southeastern part of the state. Much of what is known of the settlements' formative years is based on information gleaned from the Mabrey papers, which include school, church, governmental, and Civil War journals, as well as diaries, letters, and personal notes. Mr. Mabrey, a teacher,